Victor Hugo Travel of 1843 Victor Hugo and Basque culture

Victor Hugo and Basque culture

It was not the first time that he showed interest for this area. It was in 1811, when he visited us for the first time. Son of Léopold Hugo "Brutus", a general of Napoleon's army who took part in the peninsular War (named by the Spanish people as the Independence War) the future man of letters and his two older brothers accompanied them mother in 1811 when she travelled all around Spain in order to meet her husband, who was assigned in Madrid.

Travelling around a country which was at war, involved such danger that the French people only could face it if they were escorted by military convoys, soldiers and artillery. Victor Hugo, his mother and his brothers had to wait in Baiona until one of those convoys was formed. The period that Victor Hugo spent in this region, and which will be remembered by him as one of the happiest periods he has lived, must be the main reason why he decided to come back to visit those places that he knew once in his childhood. He was about ten years old when he came for the very first time, age in which our spirit feels open-minded and sensitive and we builds up treasures on our mind:

"I was quite little when I crossed these mountains and heard it for the first time. Merely on hearing it yesterday, as soon as ever it struck my ear, I felt myself suddenly rejuvenated, and it seemed to me that my whole childhood was renewed again within me. I cannot tell you by what strange, supernatural process my memory became fresh as an April dawn, and all came back to me at once. The slightest details of that happy time appeared to me, clear, bright, and illuminated as by the rising sun. As the ox-cart approached with its savage music, I distinctly saw that delightful past again, and it seemed to me that between that past and today there was nothing. It was nothing. It was but yesterday. Oh, blissful days! Oh, sweet and smiling years!"

Later, he would use that stay to name one of the masterpieces of his career: "Hernani".

In 1843, when he arrived, he was shocked by the deterioration of both towns and people who lived there after Carlist Wars:

"Two-thirds of the villages have been ruined by the Carlists, unless it is by the Cristinos. Scarcely six years ago the civil war was smouldering in Guipuzcoa and Navarre."

However, despite everything, it is amazing his sensibility to the Basque identity:

« Here a secret and profound tie, which nothing has been able to break, binds together, in spite of treaties, those diplomatic frontiers-in spite even of the -Pyrenees, that natural frontier- all the members of the mysterious Basque family. The old word Navarre is not merely a word. One is born Basque, one speaks Basque, one lives Basque, and one dies Basque. The Basque tongue is a fatherland; I had almost said a religion. Say a word in Basque to a mountaineer among the hills. Before pronouncing it you were to him scarcely a man; afterwards you are his brother. Here the Spanish tongue is as foreign as the French (...) France took one side of the Pyrenees, Spain the other. But neither France nor Spain has succeeded in disaggregating the Basque group. Beneath the fresh layers of history that have been piled upon it during four centuries, it is still perfectly visible, like a crater beneath a lake... »

In his travel notes and his familiar correspondence he mentioned several times the importance of the Basque language in the area, and even he managed to buy a Basque language grammar book, which he uses to take the chance of practicing some sentences for his daily life.